Wiping Messages

We are looking at switching our entire company from sendmail to zimbra. Our customers require that we be able to follow a DoD approved method for wiping sensitive emails (multi-pass wiping). I have just gone in to /opt/ximbra/store/0/<id>/msg/0/ and ran bcwipe on a .msg file. I can not longer find the file anywhere on the server but when I log into my Zimbra account the email is still sitting there. Is this message cached somewhere else?

Metadata cache

Zimbra has 3 parts to the message store:

the message blobs themselves

The Lucene full-text index of the messages

The MySQL database containing overview information for all messages

You've removed the first of these. It's highly non-trivial to remove all traces from the other two by hand. The fact that you haven't altered the MySQL database is why the message is still showing up in your listing.

On the other hand, if you delete the message through the Zimbra system (web UI, zmmailbox, zmprov, ZCO, desktop, SOAP request, etc.), the message will be removed from all three locations.